The animated film that went quietly viral last year — clips of two people in a rowboat, wearing masks, talking in the stumbling rhythms of real speech — was not the work of a studio. It came from a husband-and-wife team who made their most personal films while running perpetually out of money, and who built a career on the conviction that animation had something honest left to say.
Animation Obsessive devotes this issue to John and Faith Hubley, the independent filmmakers whose decades of work outside Hollywood's studio system produced three Oscar-winning animated shorts, a feature that flopped catastrophically and is now considered visionary, and a body of work that animators in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe studied with undisguised envy. The piece is a thorough introduction and viewing guide — and a quiet argument that the Hubleys' stubbornness about craft and independence produced something that neither the industry nor the market could have manufactured on its own.
The Blacklist as Liberation
John Hubley's career as a rising name at United Productions of America ended in 1952 when his past membership in the Communist Party got him blacklisted in Hollywood. He opened an advertising studio, Storyboard, to survive. When he married Faith that year, she redirected the studio toward independent animation — and insisted on it. "I have much stronger feelings than John about the risks of spending one's life in advertising," she said. They made their marriage vows include a commitment to produce one independent film per year.
What Animation Obsessive makes clear is that the blacklist, catastrophic as a professional event, may have been the precondition for everything that followed. Faith said it directly: "As a country, we paid a heavy cost. But personally, it allowed us great freedom. I don't know if Johnny ever would have left Hollywood. I don't know if we would have had as creative a life."
Relocating to New York in 1956, they left behind the Hollywood ecosystem entirely. Their first independently funded animated film, The Adventures of * (1957), was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum — an institution specifically dedicated to breakthrough art. John described the technical mandate: because the Guggenheim required genuine innovation, they developed a wax resist technique, rubbing paraffin over animation drawings, washing watercolor ink over the wax, then double-exposing the result over backgrounds painted the same way. The result, he said, was "like a painting coming to life." It was revolutionary. It was also the template for everything that followed.
Commerce as Cover
To fund the personal films, the Hubleys made commercials. This is a compromise most artists make and most feel ambivalent about. The Hubleys found a way to make it generative. Their Maypo cereal campaign used unscripted recordings of their young son Mark, spliced into narratives. Faith said they "just loved the idea of doing something natural and truthful with a non-professional actor." The ads were warm, authentic, and apparently a tax write-off for a failing product — which meant the Hubleys were paid well and given unusual creative latitude.
Maypo's sales spiked. The Hubleys were hired for a whole series. "It supported our personal films," Faith said. John, who had long hated what he called "prosaic hard-sell dead spots on the air," made the argument that ads should carry the "human elements" that made people watch television in the first place. Whether that was genuine philosophy or post-hoc justification, the work held together. The same improvisational, unscripted approach to audio — which produced the uncanny naturalism that caught millions of viewers off guard last year — ran through every Hubley production, commercial or not.
John noted the pragmatic bargain explicitly: "We make one for them, and one for us."
The Collaboration Question
Animation Obsessive handles the question of creative division carefully, which is the right call. Attributing the Hubley films to either partner alone misreads what they actually made. John was the animation veteran; Faith came from Hollywood's live-action side, with backgrounds in coordination, editing, and script. Their son Ray has since argued that Faith's editing of the improvised dialogue tracks "approaches being something like a writer for the films."
Faith's own account: "We collaborate on the story. John does most of the backgrounds and I do some. I do the character rendering. We both work on the soundtracks. The statement, the content, is made jointly." John resisted breaking it down further, saying only that "all of the films, right from the beginning of our stuff, have always been a very close collaboration, creatively and on every other level."
Animator Shamus Culhane believed Faith brought "a lyric quality, a subtle tender approach to filmmaking... a poetic approach" that John hadn't shown at United Productions of America. The films that won Oscars — Moonbird (1959), The Hole (1962) — came after their partnership formalized. John had won nothing at his prior studio. This is not coincidental.
Temperamentally, the two were opposites. Faith was a go-getter; John was moody, prone to depression after completing a project, hypochondriacal. They argued constantly about the work. "I don't believe there's anything wrong with fighting," Faith said. The collaboration endured and deepened anyway. What that suggests — that sustained creative friction between two people with different strengths and different temperaments can produce work that neither would have made alone — is one of the piece's quieter arguments, never stated outright.
The Animators Behind the Vision
One of Animation Obsessive's strongest contributions is its attention to the animators who executed the Hubley vision. John and Faith were not animators in the technical sense — they designed the films and directed them, but they hired artists whose craft gave their ideas physical life. The Tender Game (1958), a short romance set to Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, brought in Bobe Cannon, a legends-tier animator. Moonbird used Cannon and Ed Smith both.
For the later work, Tissa David became indispensable. She animated Eggs (1970) and Cockaboody (1973) by herself — entire films, solo. She was a master of human warmth and limited-frame economy, trained at United Productions of America, and committed to simplicity in a way that suited the Hubleys precisely. "Even if I had a high budget I would do simple animation," she said. David animated much of Everybody Rides the Carousel (1976), including the sixth section — the one with the rowboat, the masks, the couple — that went viral decades later.
The piece credits Barrie Nelson alongside David on that section. Nelson had worked on Windy Day (1968). These are not household names, but the work they produced in service of the Hubleys' vision outlasted almost everything else from that era of American television animation.
The Viral Moment and What It Proves
Everybody Rides the Carousel is not available in restored condition. The copies circulating on YouTube are, in the piece's word, "bleary." One commenter wrote, "I love the way they talk so naturally. It doesn't sound like acting. It sounds like we're listening to a home movie." Millions of views followed on footage that is technically degraded and almost fifty years old.
What that audience was responding to is exactly what John Hubley articulated when he described the mask sequence. The scene depicts a couple moving toward deeper commitment, each feeling threatened, masks appearing on their faces while their real expressions voice the conflict internally. When they succeed in removing the masks, "the figures become abstract, Matisse-like. The enactment is a ballet — a series of arms, legs, torsos and heads flowing in a dance of love." A literal love scene at that moment, he argued, "would be cartoon-like in the old sense, and would therefore present not realism but a flat and ineffective caricature."
That the sequence works on contemporary audiences encountering degraded copies suggests the underlying technique is more durable than the medium. The improvised audio, the unscripted naturalness, the refusal of conventional sentimentality — these are not period details. They produce something that reads as immediate even now.
The Cost of Staying Independent
Animation Obsessive does not romanticize the financial picture. Moonbird won the Oscar in 1960 and didn't pay off until the 1970s. The Hole won another Oscar and wasn't widely seen. Of Stars and Men (1961), the first Hubley feature, was a critical and commercial disaster that wrecked their finances. Faith recalled "banging doors and loud hisses" when it screened at Annecy in France. The studio sank further into debt across the decade.
John put the overhead plainly: "You spend a certain percentage — let's say 20, 30, 40 percent of your day — dealing with matters that have nothing to do with the pure creative." For Faith, this was simply the price of doing serious work. "If you are going to grow, stay alive, remain sensitive and valid, you have to keep working seriously. If your value in life is to be always doing what comes along, you are abandoning your responsibility as an artist."
Critics might note that the Hubleys' position was not entirely without structural support. The Guggenheim funded their first independent film. CBS funded Everybody Rides the Carousel with a half-year schedule. The viral cereal campaign that sustained their personal work was a fortunate windfall, not a replicable model. The romantic narrative of two artists working outside the system obscures the degree to which institutional and commercial patronage made the work possible at all. True independence, fully self-funded, might not have produced anything. The Hubleys were independent within a set of conditions that were considerably more favorable than what most independent animators faced then or face now.
"Truth and the budget have the last word."
That line — attributed in the piece to Faith — captures the Hubley position precisely. The budget constrains. Truth disciplines. Neither is optional. The space between them is where the work happened.
The Films and Their Legacy
Animation Obsessive's viewing guide covers a career that spans from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Windy Day (1968) recorded daughters Emily and Georgia in improvised play and shot the result on layers of underlit vellum. Zuckerkandl (1968) skewered mid-century American conformity — a philosopher's follower urging the community to "be unconscious. Be detached. Don't get involved" — in what the piece reads as a direct response to the Vietnam War. The Hubleys kept their staff deliberately small. "This work is highly personal and it suffers terrifically if it gets farmed out to strangers," Faith said.
The jazz collaborations — Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie as regular partners — gave the films a specific texture. Harlem Wednesday (1957) is simply Carter's music over paintings of mid-century Harlem. The Hole (1962) built a conversation about nuclear war around an improvised dialogue between Gillespie and actor George Mathews. The integration of jazz was not decorative. It was structural — another way of importing the improvisational, anti-scripted quality the Hubleys pursued across every element of their work.
That the animators in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were watching with envy while Disney won popular audiences is an index of something. The Hubleys got the respect of the people who knew. The popular audience, it turns out, was there all along — just waiting fifty years for a YouTube algorithm to surface the footage.
Bottom Line
Animation Obsessive's profile of the Hubleys is one of the better pieces of animation history writing to appear this year — specific about technique, honest about the financial costs of independence, and careful not to flatten a genuine collaboration into a single-auteur story. The viral moment that prompted it is almost beside the point: the work earns the attention on its own terms, and the piece makes a strong case that it always did.